The UNIX operating system is a set of programs that link the computer and the user.

UNIX operating system was created in the 1960s and has been updated continuously
since then. It is a powerful multi-user, multitasking OS created by AT&T Bell
Laboratories. It is quite popular among scientists, engineers, and academics because
of its most valued properties such as flexibility, portability, network capabilities, etc. It
is a stable, multi-user, multitasking system for servers, PCs, and laptops. It is written
in the C language, enabling the UNIX operating system to operate on various
platforms.

UNIX operating system comes with a Command Line Interface (CLI). UNIX
knowledge is required for actions that aren't covered by graphical software or when
there isn't a window interface available, such as during a telnet session.

Unix file system is a logical method of organizing and storing large

amounts of information in a way that makes it easy to manage. A file is a
smallest unit in which the information is stored. Unix file system has several
important features. All data in Unix is organized into files. All files are
organized into directories. These directories are organized into a tree-like
structure called the file system. Files in Unix System are organized into multi-
level hierarchy structure known as a directory tree. At the very top of the file
system is a directory called “root” which is represented by a “/”. All other files
are “descendants” of root. 

 
 Directories or Files and their description –
 / : The slash / character alone denotes the root of the filesystem tree.
 /bin : Stands for “binaries” and contains certain fundamental utilities, such
as ls or cp, which are generally needed by all users.
 /boot : Contains all the files that are required for successful booting
process.
 /dev : Stands for “devices”. Contains file representations of peripheral
devices and pseudo-devices.
 /etc : Contains system-wide configuration files and system databases.
Originally also contained “dangerous maintenance utilities” such as
init,but these have typically been moved to /sbin or elsewhere.
 /home : Contains the home directories for the users.
 /lib : Contains system libraries, and some critical files such as kernel
modules or device drivers.
 /media : Default mount point for removable devices, such as USB sticks,
media players, etc.
 /mnt : Stands for “mount”. Contains filesystem mount points. These are
used, for example, if the system uses multiple hard disks or hard disk
partitions. It is also often used for remote (network) filesystems, CD-
ROM/DVD drives, and so on.
 /proc : procfs virtual filesystem showing information about processes as
files.
 /root : The home directory for the superuser “root” – that is, the system
administrator. This account’s home directory is usually on the initial
filesystem, and hence not in /home (which may be a mount point for
another filesystem) in case specific maintenance needs to be performed,
during which other filesystems are not available. Such a case could occur,
for example, if a hard disk drive suffers physical failures and cannot be
properly mounted.
 /tmp : A place for temporary files. Many systems clear this directory upon
startup; it might have tmpfs mounted atop it, in which case its contents do
not survive a reboot, or it might be explicitly cleared by a startup script at
boot time.
 /usr : Originally the directory holding user home directories,its use has
changed. It now holds executables, libraries, and shared resources that
are not system critical, like the X Window System, KDE, Perl, etc.
However, on some Unix systems, some user accounts may still have a
home directory that is a direct subdirectory of /usr, such as the default as
in Minix. (on modern systems, these user accounts are often related to
server or system use, and not directly used by a person).
 /usr/bin : This directory stores all binary programs distributed with the
operating system not residing in /bin, /sbin or (rarely) /etc.
 /usr/include : Stores the development headers used throughout the
system. Header files are mostly used by the #include directive in C/C++
programming language.
 /usr/lib : Stores the required libraries and data files for programs stored
within /usr or elsewhere.
 /var : A short for “variable.” A place for files that may change often –
especially in size, for example e-mail sent to users on the system, or
process-ID lock files.
 /var/log : Contains system log files.
 /var/mail : The place where all the incoming mails are stored. Users
(other than root) can access their own mail only. Often, this directory is a
symbolic link to /var/spool/mail.
 /var/spool : Spool directory. Contains print jobs, mail spools and other
queued tasks.
 /var/tmp : A place for temporary files which should be preserved between
system reboots.
Types of Unix files – The UNIX files system contains several different types

of files :   1. Ordinary

files – An ordinary file is a file on the system that contains data, text, or
program instructions.
 Used to store your information, such as some text you have written or an
image you have drawn. This is the type of file that you usually work with.
 Always located within/under a directory file.
 Do not contain other files.
 In long-format output of ls -l, this type of file is specified by the “-” symbol.
2. Directories – Directories store both special and ordinary files. For users
familiar with Windows or Mac OS, UNIX directories are equivalent to folders.
A directory file contains an entry for every file and subdirectory that it
houses. If you have 10 files in a directory, there will be 10 entries in the
directory. Each entry has two components. (1) The Filename (2) A unique
identification number for the file or directory (called the inode number)
 Branching points in the hierarchical tree.
 Used to organize groups of files.
 May contain ordinary files, special files or other directories.
 Never contain “real” information which you would work with (such as text).
Basically, just used for organizing files.
 All files are descendants of the root directory, ( named / ) located at the
top of the tree.
In long-format output of ls –l , this type of file is specified by the “d”
symbol. 3. Special Files – Used to represent a real physical device such as
a printer, tape drive or terminal, used for Input/Output (I/O)
operations. Device or special files are used for device Input/Output(I/O) on
UNIX and Linux systems. They appear in a file system just like an ordinary
file or a directory. On UNIX systems there are two flavors of special files for
each device, character special files and block special files :
 When a character special file is used for device Input/Output(I/O), data is
transferred one character at a time. This type of access is called raw
device access.
 When a block special file is used for device Input/Output(I/O), data is
transferred in large fixed-size blocks. This type of access is called block
device access.
For terminal devices, it’s one character at a time. For disk devices though,
raw access means reading or writing in whole chunks of data – blocks, which
are native to your disk.
 In long-format output of ls -l, character special files are marked by the “c”
symbol.
 In long-format output of ls -l, block special files are marked by the “b”
symbol.
4. Pipes – UNIX allows you to link commands together using a pipe. The
pipe acts a temporary file which only exists to hold data from one command
until it is read by another.A Unix pipe provides a one-way flow of data.The
output or result of the first command sequence is used as the input to the
second command sequence. To make a pipe, put a vertical bar (|) on the
command line between two commands.For example: who | wc -l In long-
format output of ls –l , named pipes are marked by the “p” symbol. 5.
Sockets – A Unix socket (or Inter-process communication socket) is a
special file which allows for advanced inter-process communication. A Unix
Socket is used in a client-server application framework. In essence, it is a
stream of data, very similar to network stream (and network sockets), but all
the transactions are local to the filesystem. In long-format output of ls -l, Unix
sockets are marked by “s” symbol. 6. Symbolic Link – Symbolic link is used
for referencing some other file of the file system.Symbolic link is also known
as Soft link. It contains a text form of the path to the file it references. To an
end user, symbolic link will appear to have its own name, but when you try
reading or writing data to this file, it will instead reference these operations to
the file it points to. If we delete the soft link itself , the data file would still be
there.If we delete the source file or move it to a different location, symbolic
file will not function properly. In long-format output of ls –l , Symbolic link are
marked by the “l” symbol (that’s a lower case L).